The proposed research would examine the effect of parental marital disrupttion on the psychological adjustment of children, both through secondary analysis of an existing data set through a 1980 follow-up measurement of young adult respondents (now aged 20-32 years) who had experienced a parental separation/divorce during childhood. The secondary analysis would be performed for data from a representative community sample of urban families (N equals 1,034) and a sample of AFDC Welfare families (N equals 1,000); in these samples, from 25%-50% of families had experienced a marital disruption. Risk factors examined would include child's age at time of disruption: parental quarreling; mental health of mother; parental rejection of child; economic status of family; birth order of child; and ethnic background. Children's adjustment would be evaluated with respect to measures of psychological symptomatology (based on mother's report), school performance (from school records), and antisocial behavior (from police arrest records). For a subsample of children whose mothers were interviewed twice, at 5-year intervals, the relationship between parent and child adjustment before and after the disruption would be examined. Long-term effects would be investigated through follow-up interviews with subjects from the community sample. Respondents from disrupted homes would be drawn from White, Black, and Spanish-speaking backgrounds (N equals 25 for each sample) and would be compared with a sample of follow-up respondents from never-disrupted homes, matched on overall parental socioeconomic status. The interview would include measures of adult role functioning and psychological symptomatology, law violation and alcohol use, perceived economic security and career plans, and current marital satisfaction and childrearing practices (for married respondents). Prognostic analyses would investigate the importance of early measurements with respect to adult psychological status and marital satisfaction. The relationship between short-term and long-term risk factors would be examined. The results would have implications for identification of high-risk groups for therapeutic intervention, and for theories of the intergenerational transmission of marital instability.